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If you had a book coming out, and you were considering how to get people excited to buy it, read it, and talk about it, which would be most valuable to you:

1) a 3-minute segment about your book (which is long by TV news standards), including a close-up shot of the cover, on primetime CNN. . .

2) a 1,000 word piece you wrote on a topic related to your book, published in the Sunday opinion section of America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, which reaches the #6 most emailed piece on NYTimes.com within a day. . .

3) a guest post you wrote, published on the blog of one lone dude in SF obsessed with fat loss, female orgasms, and lifting Russian kettle bells?

If your goal was to cause a lightning storm of book sales, you should pick #3. I know---I did all three.

Today, I want to write about something I’d like to call the "Tim Ferriss Effect." It’s not exclusive to Tim Ferriss, but he is I believe the marquee example of a major shift that has happened in the last 5 years within the world of book promotion.

Here’s the basic idea:

When trying to promote a book, the main place you want coverage is on a popular single-author blog or site related to your topic.

The most pertinent words in that previous sentence, aside from “popular,” are “single-author.” No, not as in romantically unattached (Tim has a girlfriend now, and I know who she is, but I’m not telling!)

What I mean is, a blog---or other online audience such as an email newsletter---centered around one person who has major influence over a large, loyal audience.

In previous times, before the Internet, this was called the Oprah Effect. And don’t get me wrong, I’d still leap at the opportunity to share my message on cable with arguably the most persuasive person who ever walked the planet. (Producers---you can reach me via my website!)

But as more of our attention (and our book buying) shifts online, its only natural that the mantle Oprah held for a quarter of a century in introducing readers to new books, shifts to a digital native.

And in my opinion, the digital native who has taken up that mantle in the book world, is Tim Ferriss.

I had the fortune of being introduced to Mr. Ferriss well before his storied first book came out. Our mutual friend Doug Price introduced him to me as “this crazy dude you need to know.”

For many years, our relationship consisted primarily of him emailing me from various places he was traveling, and asking me to send him digital music, as he knew I was a connoisseur of Cuban salsa, which he was starting to get into. I knew him as a proprietor of a sports nutrition business, with a penchant for travel and a rather crazy book idea that had been rejected by major publishers 20+ times.

Tim and I developed a friendship, and over the years, I watched him transform himself from Tim Ferriss to Tim Ferriss: the Silicon Valley guru for whom---it seems---everything he touches turns to gold.

Fast forward many years to my recent book launch for The Education of Millionaires. This was the most important moment of my professional life. I had published one book before, which I was proud of, but this was my first career-defining book: a hardcover release, on two topics of current national discussion (career development, in the middle of a nasty economic downturn, and higher education, in the middle of a mounting debate over the value and cost of higher ed.)

I was scrambling to do everything I possibly could to get the word out about this book. I had no idea what I was doing---I had never done a national hardcover book launch before. A lot was riding on this for me.

I tried everything. I basically made the launch up as I went. I released the Introduction and Chapter 1 of my book to my (then exceedingly tiny) email list and Twitter following, hoping that would “go viral.” (It didn’t.)

I did interviews with various radio shows and even some national business websites. I’d do those interviews again---but I didn’t notice a huge spike in Amazon sales after any of these.

(By the way, my main metric in all of this story is Amazon rank, because that is the primary real-time gauge of sales available to authors, allowing you as an author to see the hour-by-hour impact of each specific piece of publicity that gets released. You’ll only ever truly understand this sentiment below, which I posted on my Facebook, until you’ve done your own book launch.)

Before launch day, I did teleseminar interviews with several of my friends who had email lists. I received an enthusiastic response from their audience, for which I was extremely grateful, and I would welcome the opportunity again---but in general their audience wasn’t of the size that would move the needle significantly on Amazon rankings.

By September 28th, 2011, the eve of my book launch (when I posted that Facebook comment), after weeks and weeks of promotion along these lines, my Amazon ranking was up to this:

Pretty darn good. But not earth-shattering.

Then, the next day, around 3:30 PM eastern on official launch day, Tim Ferriss logged onto his WordPress control panel, and pressed “Publish” on an 8,000-word guest post I had worked on over the previous several weeks, for his blog.

The post opened with Tim briefly explaining how he knew me, endorsing me as a person, and describing the book (with a link to my book.) It then went directly into my guest post-- there was not even an explicit call to action to buy my book or even any positive statements about my book.

An hour later, this:

I was astonished. To see something with my name attached to it, selling on Amazon at a rank in two digits.

Here was another a fun screen-shot from that day:

I beat Tim (often called the Dale Carnegie of the digital age) and Mr. Carnegie himself, for a few days, thanks largely to Tim.

Now, I know, it wasn’t a New York Times bestseller. It wan’t #1 on Amazon. It wasn’t even Top 10 on Amazon.

But also I know a lot of authors who would die to reach #45 on Amazon on launch day. (Including me.)

For the next two months, I tried to day everything and anything to regain the Amazon ranking crack-high that that guest post gave me (unlike crack, the high lasted for weeks, as I stayed in the Top 100 for the next few weeks.)

Never got it back though.

I did all kinds of press in the subsequent weeks after Tim's post. (If you want to, you can see some samples here.) I'm proud of this press, I'm grateful for the outlets for giving me the opportunity, and I would welcome the opportunity again. No complaints there.

But even the big opportunities that came my way didn’t ever have the effect on my book promotion that that one post on Tim’s blog did.

I had the good fortune of being able to write an opinion piece for the New York Times, related to my book. Now, the editors of the op-ed page of the New York Times don’t give a damn what effect their editorial choices have on an author’s book sales, nor should they. They’re there to provoke national discussion on important topics, and I believe the piece I wrote (with their very helpful editorial suggestions) did exactly that.

But no author in the world is going to avoid at least hoping that coverage in the nation’s newspaper of record might also unleash a torrent of buyers, landing him on that paper’s famed bestsellers list.

The op-ed reached the #6 on their “Most Emailed” ranking on their site. There were two or three days when it seemed I could not log onto Facebook or Twitter without seeing a river or retweets or Facebook shares of my piece.

I thought, with my piece getting to #6 on the “Most Emailed” list, and the s***-storm of social media action the piece was getting, there was no way this thing wasn’t going to hit bestseller list.

But instead:

That was the highest the book ever reached in the days after the New York Times piece and the crazy wild storm of social media sharing it received (up in rank from #1,301 the day before the Times piece went live.)

Similar pattern: A week later, I was on primetime CNN---OutFront with Erin Burnett---talking about my Times piece and my book. That’s a slot any author in the world (including me) would covet, and I’d leap at the opportunity again.

Yet even primetime TV coverage didn’t afford me the break into that under-100 Amazon-ranking I was so jonesing to re-experience:

Nothing to sneeze at---but I still wasn’t able to break under 100 again. Nothing, it seemed---not even major mainstream national media and a social media feeding-frenzy--could match that Amazon-ranking high that a single piece on Tim’s blog afforded me.

What was going on here? Why did one piece on a single blog work such wonders in comparison to major national media?